This was on a blog post at influxinsights.com. Johan Bloom from Ad Age spoke at their conference last week and identified 6 ways agencies will have to adapt to be more relevant to client needs in the next few years.

10.18.2007

I'm running into a ridiculous number of people in the lobby at this conference. Not sure if lobby networking is the next big thing or if this is some kind of a reflection on the kind of people I hang out with.

One of those non-badge carrying folks was a friend from the good old days, Richard Jalichandro. He became the CEO of Technorati a couple weeks ago. Woo-hoo, Richard! Nice friggin' work. Maybe the people I hang out with ain't so bad after all.

Listening in for "the buzz" at the Web 2.0 Summit here. A couple things I'm hearing a lot about are:

widgetization - clearly Adobe is going to capitalize this with AIR, but the idea that your web apps should be portable is full-on across the board.

open APIs - this is kind of a no-brainer with the prevalence of Facebook platform (they asked the room how many people were involved in some way with a Facebook app when Zuck was on stage and about 70% of the people in the room raised their hand!). Speakers who are not opening their platforms were being chided onstage by their interviewers (Meg Whitman from eBay for example).

presence - the concept of presence is on a lot of lips. This is what Twitter is all about. People microblogging their every move online. This sounds like a flash in the plan to grown-ups, but AOL and Microsoft are talking about it and so are a lot people here. Going to be in the Wired/Tired/Expired column soon.

Watching a panel of guys from companies that have been successful on Facebook. Really psyched about this b/c Traction is developing programs and applications for two clients right now.

Representatives from FoodFight, iLike and a few others are up there.

Food Fight guy: the reason Food Fight is successful is because people are able to do things that they can't do in real life. Like throw a peanut butter sandwich at you.

iLike guy: A lot of the apps are "light-hearted" and fun, but this doesn't mean that's how things will be. The platform is only 4 months old.

Slide guy: 60-70% of Facebook users have a Slide app on their profile! Their first batch of apps was a failure, so they went back and created new ones based on what they learned users wanted. Note to self: Study this model.

Food Fight guy: If legacy big businesses don't let go of their website models and jump in to theses social network platforms, they're going to be let behind.

RockYou guy: within each locale there is one social network that dominates. In some that will be Facebook, in others it will be different ones.

I'm at the Web 2.0 Summit right now. Sadly, the continental breakfast was closed at the Palace hotel and the woman guarding the coffeepot was a bulldog, so I'm blogging sans caffeine.

Watching Steve Ballmer (CEO of Microsoft) being interviewed by John Battelle on stage right now. He's actually a really funny guy (considering he's the leader of the evil empire). John asked him if he thought MSN Search was the bastard stepchild (paraphrasing, of course) and Steve looked like a crazed maniac raving and giggling through a bit about how he saw it as he 3 year old prodigy that was playing basketball with the 12 year olds. John will be cleaning spit off his glasses after the interview, I'm sure.

Anyhow, looking forward to Meg Whitman from eBay next. Saw Mark Zuckerberg from Facebook, the CEO of Nokia whose name I can't remember and Bruce Chizen, CEO of Adobe yesterday. I'll log back on and write some more about that stuff later.

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I'm the CEO of Traction—ranked one of top two interactive agencies in the US for 2009 and 2010 by BtoB Magazine. I'm passionate about marketing, advertising, technology, my family and tai chi. I've been blogging since 1998.